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New Security-Enhanced Linux Release
James Cho writes: "Four days ago, the 2nd public release of the NSA's 'security-enhanced' version of Linux (it's not an entire distribution) came out. The NSA describes it as having 'a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture incorporated into the major subsystems of the kernel". However it must be noted that this 'is not intended as a complete security solution for Linux' and that there is 'still much work needed to develop a complete security solution'."
I have to say, it really is nice to see the NSA contributing to an open source project in such a positive manner. Being "open" isn't exactly one of their usual activities. From the changelog it looks like they are really digging into the depths of the kernel too -- not just superficial changes. Is anyone running this in a production environment?
As many as it takes to catch all the mass-murdering and linux-using terrorists.
as soon as it is mandatory for encryption to have a gov't controlled back door, fork the distribution and start developement outside of the USA, much like OpenBSD.
The NSA is doing a bang up job, but their work will be seriously compromised if the USA Gov't is successful in legislating mandatory back doors in all encryption products.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
This is looking very nice. They're putting hooks into lots of places in the kernel. If the hooks themselves are accepted into the core kernel, then many of the different Linux security projects (like LIDS) will be able to work with little (or even no) kernel patching. It also has clean seperation between it's various components, so that anyone can plug in their own implentation of any of the sub-systems; thus, just like in Perl, ther'll be More Than One Way To Do It.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I think you have a valid point (as well as fossa, who mentioned that the NSA is no homogenous organization), but what I'd really like to see, is someone (no, make that many people), who knows something about the kernel _and_ security/crypto-theory to wade through the patches and make sure, that there are no backdoors. Of course you it's not an easy task to do, but I think this time it is neccessary ... and if this person/these people then publish there findings (of course signed with GPG, with a well-known, many-signed key) we might be able to use this code for real.
Guys... come on. So far (at 1:26 am pst) Almost every post to this article is talking about encryption. Having an educated opinion is worth a lot more than an uneducated one. Do a little more research please :)
This is NOT encryption. What SELinux provides is stronger access control mechanisms. This means that users and programs only have access they need in order to get their job done.
This is a totally different thing from encryption. Encryption is one thing this is actually NOT touching. Encryption on most systems is useless if someone can break in and obtain the key needed to decript whatever you are trying to keep secret.
In a environment with better access control, it makes it a LOT harder for someone to actually gain that type of access. If someone breaks into your mail daemon or your http daemon, they only gain the rights that program had, nothing more.
I do agree however, that it is nice to see the government helping community (opensource/free speech) software. I think this is something we could use a lot more of.
Luke
Good to hear that they're still actively working on this open source project, in light of the recent events. It seems at least some people at the NSA don't believe that banning security measures is the answer to all problems.
Backlash from the tragedy? Unless the tragedy you're referring to is the development of public key encryption, no. The leadership of the NSA (and related government entities such as the FBI) has been consistently demanding backdoors and key escrow for decades. The people in charge certainly have a homogeneous opinion, and the low level workers will not be making decisions about whether or not to add backdoors to anything.
Normally this might be cause for concern, but it has the strength of being open source, so the patches can be scrutinised by the OS community and if there's something dodgy about it, you can bet your hard disk that word would get out.
And if you're worried about the government slipping you dodgy binaries... compile from source!
Go buy a clue.
What offends *me* is your ignorance, gross generalizations, and knee-jerk reactions. By your logic I assume we should also outlaw writing. After all, they did find a letter with instructions for the terrorists. It's antiquated, hand-written messages like that that are the *real* danger to this country. Only through illiteracy can we be truly safe.
As for me, I'm off to bed. No, really. I have to get some sleep before I go to work tomorrow.
Jeez... I really hope this was just a sarcastic post that went over my head b/c I was sleepy... "Communist open source tools"? Yeah, it's gotta be a joke. No one could say that with a straight face and mean it.
like a knight in shining armor/from a long time ago
Just when I thought it was safe to run Linux on my home PC there comes this news. I'm still trying to figure out what that mysterious NSA registry key in Windows does...yes, such a key really exists in Windows - do a search here on Slashdot or Google for more info.
Anything put out, funded, etc by the NSA or any other agency should be considered suspect until PROVEN otherwise...and before anyone here says "but it's open source"...keep in mind there have been numerous instances of serious bugs, weaknesses, etc found many years after various open source programs were released.
Bottom line: Just because a particular program is open source, does NOT automatically mean that particular program can truly be trusted.
[I usually don't answer cut'n paste trolls...]
> What offends me (not to mention the 6000+ innocent dead and their grieving families) most
> about this story is, the terrorists made use of these kinds of communist open source tools to
> plan, communicate, and carry out their attack.
And they used "Microsoft Flight Simulator" for training.
It really offends me that millions of people are still using Microsoft products after this tragedy.
If the NSA really wanted to put out a piece of software they could use as a back door, they would do it discreetly. There is no advantage for them to introduce a back door into an open piece of software.
:)
This is not some new scheme to control the population... No doubt the people working on this are just geeks, whom are much like many of us here on slashdot.
I think we should applicate and WELCOME the fact that the government is spending our tax dollars on something that makes our community better. I personally would like to see a lot MORE involvement from the government on community (free speech/Open Source) projects. The government (not just U.S., but many of the governments world wide) has a lot of really talented people. People like this could do a lot of good for the community. (Although yes I admit, they could also do a lot of harm.)
I think this is a good step in the right direction and I hope to see a lot more of this in the future.
(And no, I do not work for the government.
Luke
Anything put out, funded, etc by the NSA or any other agency should be considered suspect until PROVEN otherwise...and before anyone here says "but it's open source"...keep in mind there have been numerous instances of serious bugs, weaknesses, etc found many years after various open source programs were released.
Bottom line: Just because a particular program is open source, does NOT automatically mean that particular program can truly be trusted.
The NSA has published several research papers on on SE Linux as well as the OSes leading up to it (Flask, DTOS, DTMach) and it is hard to find malice in what they suggest should be how OSes should be improved security-wise.
If you are so suspicious of SE Linux then don't install it or even better use the benefits of Open Source and actually read through source to see if the code matches what they claim in their research papers. Heck, diff the major source files against a stock distro and see what has changed and why. Open Source is of no benefit if people treat it like closed source and want everything handed to them on a platter.
Well, enough people have said "read the source yourself", so I won't go into that.
:)
Here's the other way to look at it... as in "why would they do this?". If you consider the security of the servers used by american businesses as a national concern (and remember that the US Govt has a LONG history of getting involved JUST to help businesses), then helping make a stronger, more secure Linux kernel *IS* a national security issue.
I'd go on in more detail but it's 3:20 AM and my wife is complaining.
These are the ones I know about:
Trustix Secure Linux
Engarde Linux
Immunix (seem to ship a secured Red Hat)
Kaladix Linux
Can't say if they are any good, I'm afraid. I'm too happy running Debian!
-- shaka
:wq!
First of all, this in not about encryption.
:) Oh yeah, and it has to support single login.
Linux already has security at the group and user level. But that is not good enough security for the real world.
What security like this does is allow you very fine control over everything that a user or process is allowed to do or to access, right down to system calls.
So, your web server is running and only has read access to it's config files, and write access to its logs and can only call the system calls that it needs to do it's job.
Let's say that there is a buffer overflow in the web server and someone tried to exploit it. Geeze, they can't start a shell, because they don't have any access to a shell, the web server didn't need that access. So, even though there is a buffer overflow, they can't get a shell from it.
Let's say that somehow they got a shell from this activity, all that the shell would have access to would be the web server content, config files, and log files and they could execute cgi scripts. And nothing else. And the cgi scripts would be locked down even tighter than the web server was. They couldn't even see anything that wasn't web related.
The really nice thing about this level of security is that the concept of an all powerful root becomes almost meaningless. Any user can be granted specific rights to run certain programs.
This means that administrators for each subsystem can have the rights they need to do their job.
Where we do need encryption is a good directory service for Linux servers that would allow this level of security access controls at the enterprise level across 10's, 100's or even 10,000's of servers.
Imagine being able to add a new person to a single database and instantly give them the rights that they need to do their job across a network that spans the globe.
Or is that just me? *L*
The problem is that do you really think the terrorists (for example) are going to decide to use SeLinux, made in America by those kind folks at the NSA?
I won't, they sure as hell won't either...
This distro's sole purpose is to gain the NSA a foothold in the Linux market; where their software will be incorporated into other distro's.
In the grand scheme of things, they're gaining a foothold in the operating system area...
Does anyone else worry about the NSA making the Linux kernel easy to modify? All I could think about while reading the above comment was "what else are they planning to put in?"
The NSA creates a system where you can plug in the security architecture that you want and you complain? Would you rather that they hardcoded it so only NSA provided security features could be used?
I guess it just goes to show that you can't please everyone.
..you find that the changes are not about encryption, but preventing programs already on your system from doing something they shouldn't do. As the changes offer increased security from the basic kernel, the NSA won't be able to do anything with this that they can't do with your current system.
:-) ]
As the NSA have released the source code for these changes I hardly see any reason why one should not run such a kernel. I may hesitate to run a binary from these guys, but if these changes get incorporated into the mainstream kernel I'll still run Linux.
On another point, maybe it is worthwhile seeing what is required to get an increased security classification for Linux; the FAQ raises some interesting issues in the form of documentation and auditing. Maybe the first could be performed under the auspices of the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) and some of the other secure Linux distributors would be interested in coordinating the latter.
If Linux was approved as a secure OS, then takeup by goverments would be much more enthusiastic, and as civil service employment would require at least Linux desktop knowledge, that would lead to a need for it to be taught in schools, which is where hopefully the next generation fo kids won't grow up to by Windows lusers. [bit like a reverse of the fear leads to anger...to the Dark Side argument, isn't it?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
So, this may be what they are counting on. Make the source actually be secure with no back doors- and count on the difficulty of actually compiling your entire os from source to deter people from actually *using* the secure version. Oh, and make a big fat server available from which you can download the binaries- source is available on papyrus if you send a S.A.S.E., thank you.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I mean, the USA != the world. If the NSA does something, or decides something, why should I find that a good thing? The NSA is an agency of a country where I don't live in, which has another system in place that spies on our economy (Echelon). Why on earth should I trust the NSA?
ps: no, I'm not happy about the NSA approved keys in windows either, allthough these are not usable to enter a system.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Is that they can download the source themselves, and then compile their own binaries. There's no need to "trust" the program not to screw you over - if you have enough knowledge, you can examine the source yourself.
I'm the stranger...posting to
True enough. We can always ask why they put in the constant b4ckd00r and set it to binlLadenhasnoSkI11z.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Yeah, but I'd bet you'd be all over some rpm posted to a GeoCities webpage by someone only known as d34Thm4tCH because that's what the OSS revolution is all about.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Why don't you read the article instead of looking out the window for black helicopters????
SELinux implements a more robust access control mechanism in Linux. This is similar to TrustedSolaris/AIX/BSD/HPUX. It has nothing to do with encryption.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If people would bother to click on the link in the story, you would be able to remove the tin hats and stop whining about encryption backdoors and black helicopters.
This is the text of the abstract of the NSA project. You can find it here http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/policy_abstract.html
The security architecture of the system is general enough to support many security policy abstractions. The access controls in the implemention currently support a combination of two, type enforcement and role-based access control. This combination was chosen because togther they provide powerful tools to construct useful security policies. The specific policy that is enforced by the kernel is dictated by security policy configuration files which include type enforcement and role-based access control components.
The type enforcement component defines an extensible set of domains and types. Each process has an associated domain, and each object has an associated type. The configuration files specify how domains are allowed to access types and to interact with other domains. They specify what types (when applied to programs) can be used to enter each domain and the allowable transitions between domains. They also specify automatic transitions between domains when programs of certain types are executed. Such transitions ensure that system processes and certain programs are placed into their own separate domains automatically when executed.
The role-based access control component defines an extensible set of roles. Each process has an associated role. This ensures that system processes and those used for system administration can be separated from those of ordinary users. The configuration files specify the set of domains that may be entered by each role. Each user role has an initial domain that is associated with the user's login shell. As users execute programs, transitions to other domains may, according to the policy configuration, automatically occur to support changes in privilege.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
It seems NSA needs a "security enhanced" OS for its own website. If you look at the statistic of their website on netcraft , it seems that they have to reboot their solaris servers every 3 days !
" backdoors will they put here?"
As has been said before ad nauseum, if there's a backdoor, it will be trivial to spot because it's open source. Distrust of the government only works if you're logical about it.
If there's a backdoor, why haven't you looked at the publicly-available source code and found it yet? And better yet, how do you put a back door into encryption in a product that has no encryption?
If this even was about encryption (which it's not), knowing how an encryption algorithm works and how to defeat it are two entirely different things. If crypto software relied entirely on the program's ability to hide how it encrypted something, then it's a simple matter to buy yourself a copy and decompile it.
The NSA has two tasks charged to it: 1) obtaining elint in non-US nations and 2) preventing other nations from gaining elint in the US.
Part of the second task is securing US government systems. Many US gov't installations can only use Solaris, HPUX, and a few related Unices because they are the only ones that meet the NSA's standards for security. I imagine that the NSA realizes that if Linux were to be an option, they could actually save some money (which, instead of being spent elsewhere in the gov't could be spent at NSA...).
I'm getting sick of all the paranoid types here going on and on about how it's antithetical of the NSA to make a truly secure product for the masses, you can't trust them, blah blah blah...
Secure encryption is a matter of national security. It's a matter of an American company being able to keep its secrets secure from foreign competition (amongst other things). It's about AMD being able to make a new innovation, for instance, without having to worry about Hitachi "coincidentally" and suddenly patenting that same innovation before AMD gets to the patent office.
If you're going to have to rely on such a program for the validity of the economy (et al), there is no logical reason to shoot yourself in the foot by installing back doors in all such software. That secret back door cannot stay a secret forever. All it requires is one act of treason for that "secret" back door to be just about anything but (possibly even public domain).
Yes, I know the FBI wants escrow encryption, but even then that's only giving the Feds the ability to get to the keys to decrypt it (with a court order), not some magic key of their own. Because again, that magic key is one act of treason away from the public domain.
And here comes the flame...
It disturbs me how many posts on here all say the same thing: "It says 'NSA,' so therefore it must be bad." And yet, surprisingly enough, nobody has yet to find any such super secret NSA log-in account in the open source code. This gut reaction reminds me too much of the people who were saying as early as the evening of September 11th that it was all an ATF plot. Can't you people think differently for once, especially when there's no logical reason not to? I pity you for not being able to change gears every once in a while. If Congress passed a resolution delcaring the sky was blue, where would that leave you?
Blind distrust of the government is just as bad as blind trust, if not moreso. At least with blind trust it demonstrates the ability to trust something, and you can go out of the house every once in a while without putting your aluminum foil suit on...
With this new kernel interface you'll be able to set your system up to taste, with configurations running all the way from basic Unix security like we have now to the exotic super-security system flavor of the week.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
You know, with all due respect, I think a lot of slashdotters have watched too many reruns of the X-Files. The NSA is an agency charged with defending the United States *against* threats to national security. As recent events (not WTC, but rather the slew of worms and virii) have demonstrated, one of the greatest threats to our electronic infrastructure is having a few gazillion easily hackable machines on the Internet. It's part of their mission to prevent that. After all, it's not like they haven't done it before.
Yes, the NSA has acted to help Americans protect our secrets before. Why? Because it helps our country for banks, companies, and people to be able to do their work without fear of their private data being stolen. For those of us who follow encryption, recall that NSA helped IBM optimize DES against differential cryptanalysis, long before differential cryptanalysis was a public technique (yes, they also limited keylength, but presumably that was to set things up so that they could break in, but only in emergencies with a *lot* of effort -- it still takes 24-odd hours for modern specially designed machines to break DES, do you think the NSA could have done better in the late 70s?).
Even when they were trying to foist Clipper off on us, the people over at NSA always acknowledged that helping Americans (and the global economy) maintain secure systems is a good thing. As lots of people have pointed out, SeLinux is about access controls, not encryption. The NSA has every reason to help develop secure products so that large groups of Internet servers are not easily hacked, and no reason to install a backdoor which anybody could discover (and, if unethical, exploit) simply by perusing the source code.
That said, if you're qualified, feel free to browse the code -- being careful is good, but being paranoid and reflexively hostile to people who devote their lives to public service is bad.
What to do with it?
1) come up with a mandatory security policy that makes sense in a web server environment, and
2) modify Apache to live within that security policy. At that point, you have a secure web server that stays secure even if the web server has holes. That's what this is all about.
Mandatory security actually works; it's just hard to live with. It means things like "administrator programs can't read lower-level data." That prevents them from becoming contaminated with viruses, but it's a pain to live with.
The key to all this is that the amount of trusted software becomes much smaller. Everything that ever runs as "root" under UNIX is trusted. In a mandatory security environment, only a few programs have strong privileges. Typically, these are dumb little programs that do one job (like installing user accounts or copying files for backup) and nothing else. You never trust something big like EMACS.
Disclaimer: I don't work for NSA. I am, however, a geek.
Let's see here. Largest concentration of computing power on the face of the earth. Home of some of the top mathematicians on earth. The chance to work on solving problems that nobody else even knows about (e.g. strengthening DES against differential cryptanalysis many years ago).
The pay probably sucks compared to private sector, and no doubt there's more than even the large amount of red tape that comes with a "normal" dot-gov career, but the fringe benefits - all the computing power you can play with, the chance to work with - or to develop - revolutionary technologies, probably more than makes up for the bad parts.
And all you really have to be able to do (well, apart from play with all the cool toys) is keep your mouth shut when you're not at the office. (And as geeks, most of us are introverted enough that keeping our mouths shut isn't a problem for us :)
For a potential applicant, most of this is known in advance. It's not like you wake up one morning, figure "Hey, I need to make next month's rent, I wonder if NSA is hiring".
So all in all, while it's not a career for everyone, I'd imagine that those who work there manage to find both personal and professional fulfillment there, and as a result, do enjoy their jobs.
Not everybody who does Open Source is into the whole "community development" ideology. Some, such as the NSA and cryptography developers, are simply interested in the security advantages. Personally, I consider the main strength of Open Source to be its ability to create standards without falling into the design-by-committe trap. To see what I mean, compare KDE with CDE.
Everyone is talking about either remote exploits, or encryption, or NSA backdoors...
SElinux has NOTHING to do with any of those...
IT's about intenral access controls for applications so they only have access to the resources they need to get the job done.
So, in the future, say, a large, huge server can run *securely* where differnet internal users are safer from each other.
Don't forget... a number of the terrorists booked their tickets on Expedia from a MS Windows computer at Kinkos (according to the NY Times)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Argh... why did I miss this thread until it was pushed into the sidebar.
.DLL can be exploited for full root) how many other departments will we see switch in the next few years?
I'm surprised no one mentioned this: does this mean that the U.S. goverment is going to do as some Slashdotters have suggested? They have, after all, found Microsoft guilty of breaking certain anti-trust laws. Perhaps this is the first move in divesting the government from being a customer of a convicted corporation.
Before Linux is ready for the U.S. government's sensitive information, time for a security overhaul. What better group to give that job to than the NSA? And they will play by the book and release the source, as they of all groups know the value of security through obscurity (none.) They might even get a few tips from Linux kernel hax0rs on possible 'sploits they disregarded, as they also know where the know-how (and the willingness to help out) is.
Now that one U.S. government agency will have a certified secure OS that they were able to review and alter the source code of, which doesn't have any backdoors and has true modular security (none of which can be said of closed-source Windows, where there is not six but one degree of separation and a bug in a minor support
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Sigh. Something that wouldn't happen if people would pay attention when they designed and wrote their root daemons. Qmail's never been cracked like that (No, I'm not saying I like DJB, but his code is pretty good.)